Next Monday: NYAS @ Wenner-Gren

This upcoming Monday, March 26th at 7:00 PM, the anthropology section of the New York Academy of Sciences will be holding the penultimate meeting of the spring lecture series at the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This time we welcome medical anthropologist Merrill Singer of the University of Connecticut who will speak on “Syndemics and the Contemporary Global Health Transition” with Brooklyn College’s Patricia Antoniello attending as a discussant.

Epidemiologists and medical anthropologists alike have participated in the construction of historic frameworks designed to characterize broad eras of human disease transition. While the dominance of infectious and chronic diseases, respectively, have been said to characterize the first and second epidemiological transitions, a rapidly changing world has made it difficult to agree upon the prevailing features of the contemporary era of human disease. It is the argument of this presentation that one of the foremost threats to 21st century health is an ever more complex array of adversely interacting diseases, infectious and chronic (including chronic infectious diseases) the spread of which is being driven by the dual (and often interacting) forces of globalism and global warming. To that degree that identifying distinct eras of epidemiological transition remains useful approach to conceiving the history of global health, syndemics—as deleterious disease interactions have been labeled—promise to be a critical component of another alteration in the global health profile of humanity. In this process, human inequality will continue to be a determinant of how this transition is differential experienced and differential produced through human action.